Michael Tappan:  

Life We've all moved on. And I look back to a day in 1975 when everything I owned could be packed into, or tied with bungee cords onto my 1969 Volkswagen Beetle. At the end of that year's winter I left for Colorado from Long Beach. I stopped to say good bye to my parents in San Bernardino. And my pensive mother handed me a large sack of sandwiches for the trip. In Kingman, Arizona I discovered that instead of letuce in the sandwiches, she had substituted a few $20 bills. I felt very rich. Weeks later, sitting in a small two-room apartment in Denver, I felt very alone. Friendships came with time, leftward leaning politics and a job. My wife had made a similar journey to Denver from upstate New York via Fort Worth, Texas. We met while she was a graduate student at the University of Denver. We were married the day after I turned thirty. Patty is Irish. She comes from a large extended and animated family. I, on the other hand, was raised with less knowledge of heritage and distant relations (each seemed to have scatterd to the winds). My familial dynamics were subdued. We both viewed each other's family as if they had come from a far away but interesting planet. As we grow older we seem to drift toward the once unfamiliar styles of our in-laws: Patty a little less the extravert, me a little less the introvert. We have two children, a boy and a girl, born eighteen months apart. Devin was born in 1980. Meghan was born in 1982. The high school they atended reminded me of San Bernardino High: an older two story public school built in the '20's, a diverse student population and wisecracking adolescents. I graduated from Valley College, Long Beach State, Metropolitan ...Expand for more